by Tim Roux
“That could be useful, then. Good idea. When Uncle Jean goes to see Capitaine Herbert, Fiona’s father can make contact with the commissaire. That will fix everything.”
“OK.”
Alice clasps her hands with glee in thin air. “Are you ready to draw the map?” she proposes enthusiastically. “I think I know how we can do it.”
* * *
I return to pick Mike up from Valflaunès to ferry him back to Freyrargues. It seems a stupid journey – over an hour of driving to get back to where I was in the first place.
This puts me in a bad mood which has nothing to do with Mike, but that does not stop me taking my frustrations out on him.
Mike initially ignores my spikiness but after a while he begins to punch back.
“Why are you in such a bad mood?”
“I’m not.”
“Sure you’re not. Why does your outstandingly good mood involve beating me up?”
“Leave it out.”
“Exactly.”
“You are annoying me.”
“Exactly.”
“Stop saying ‘exactly’.”
“Exactly.”
“I said stop saying ‘exactly’.”
“Precisely.”
Stony silence, all the rest of the way to Freyrarques.
We arrive at the Château to find not a single car on the drive way. The place has been evacuated, at least momentarily. The doors are open, of course, and the staff are there, but no family, no friends, and only one hanger-on, a guy called Albert who is carrying an apple in his hand.
“Where is everybody?” Mike asks.
“They went to Montpellier.”
“Everyone?”
“Yes, they went early. Even the Earl and Countess.”
“They went out too?”
“Yes. It is some kind of event, followed by lunch at Le Jardin des Sens. Two Michelin stars. Too much chocolate, in my opinion.”
“You can get too much chocolate?”
“They obviously don’t think so.”
“And who are you?”
“Albert.”
“A friend of the family’s?”
“No, a friend of Neil.”
“Neil?”
“Yes, Neil is a friend of Peter, and Peter is a friend of Gerri’s, and Gerri is a friend of Sarah. It sounds a bit tenuous, doesn’t it?”
“Well, yes, in a way.”
He holds his apple in the air. “But it still gets me an apple. And you?”
“We are friends of Fiona,” I reply.
Albert pulls a face. “Second degree. Very impressive. I bow to you.”
At which point he bows. Neither Mike nor I quite know how to react to this. It must be an English thing.
“Can you get me to Montpellier?” Albert almost demands of us.
“We’ve just arrived,” Mike protests.
“There is nobody here,” Albert assures us.
“Does there have to be?” I ask. “I rather like the space.”
“But you are going back into Freyrargues,” Mike fires at me.
“So?”
“So what is the space to you?”
“I would very much appreciate a lift into Montpellier,” Albert insists.
“I am not gate crashing Le Jardin des Sens,” Mike declares.
“Why not?” challenges Albert. “It isn’t that bad.”
Mike is silenced. We both stare at Albert as if here is a slug in need of a humane pellet.
Albert affects a smarmy grin and turns towards the back stairs and Mme. Paladin in the kitchens, down in the basement. “Suit yourselves,” he jabs over his shoulder. “I am sure that I can persuade them to cook us something here, unless that is against your consciences too.”
“Not against mine,” Mike calls triumphantly.
“Nor mine,” I add.
Albert disappears from view firmly convinced that we are novices and ingénues.
* * *
Alice is somewhere here in the park but virtually impossible to see. At least, I assume that she is here. She cannot have much to detain her and she is pretty pumped up about nailing her dad.
The park is empty, which is a relief because when I do meet up with Alice I am going to look like I’m talking to myself.
I turn 360 degrees calling “Alice” through rigid lips like a ventriloquist. “Alice ‘ave you got a got a gottle o’ geer?”
“Comment?” Alice whispers from behind me – well she may have been in front of me at one point in my circuit.
“You’re here!”
“Ssssh!”
“There’s nobody here.”
“We need to practise. Speak in a whisper. Sit down on the bench and pretend to read something.” She has obviously noticed my book. “What is it by the way?”
“It’s a book about what happens in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s called ‘The Road’.”
“Sounds fun!”
“It’s very good, but it isn’t fun.”
“My Papa should be out in about twenty minutes.”
Alice is sitting beside me but I can still barely identify even her outline. It is more as if there is a heat wave distorting the air and refracting it. It being summer in the South of France, there is a heat wave anyway, at 35 degrees today, but the air looks different where I assume Alice is perched. For the first time, I get a rushing impulse to hug her, which of course I can’t do, even if she would let me. The impossibility of it aches in my stomach. I don’t know why this has suddenly happened to me – perhaps because we have nothing better to do and always, in the past, when I have been with a girl and there is nothing happening, I have tended to start playing with her to pass the time. That option is not available here, so now I do not know what to do with my hands, my chest or my time.
“Alice, I want to hug you.”
“I was thinking the same thought a second or two ago.”
“Were you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a real pain your being dead, isn’t it?”
“We would probably not have met if I had been alive. I wouldn’t have bothered with an English boy. We may not even have met each other.”
“But now that we have …. ”
“We will have to conduct a purely spiritual relationship.”
I get a bit daring. “Do you still have urges?”
“What sort of urges?”
“To hug people, or kiss them, or whatever.”
“Yes, of course. My soul is still functioning normally.”
“Do you feel them like you used to feel them, in your body?”
“Yes, I still feel as if I have arms and legs, everything in fact, but especially arms and legs.”
“How strange.”
“Well, you get it if you have a limb amputated. You get phantom sensations. I am a phantom and I get those sensations. It all figures.”
“That must be really frustrating.”
“Most of the time I don’t think about it, but I have wanted to hold your hand once or twice, and to really kiss you on your cheek, and now I want to hold you too. That is frustrating. It helps that you are understanding.”
“We’ll have to treat it as a handicap between us, just something we have to work our way around and not get too upset about. What is, is.”
“Yes, thanks to my Papa. He can still do anything physical he wants, that is for sure. He is doing it right now with Mme. de Belletier, and very annoying it is too. Poor Maman, she has been devoted to him all his life, and I bet you that he has been playing around all their lives too, pretending to be making sales calls and picking up women where he can find them.”
“Is he a salesman or does he have his own business?”
“He is a salesman for a piping company. He covers the South-West for them – Aquitaine, Midi-Pyrenées and the Languedoc-Roussillon. He is always travelling and no doubt always fucking too. That is how he knew where to bury me. He will have explained being there as a sales call. Picking me up will have b
een another one. I now realise exactly how he works. He doesn’t care a damn for his family. Maman and I are just there as people he can cover himself with when he has not got a better adventure to distract him. Fuck them and move on, that’s him.”
I haven’t heard Alice swearing before although I have recognised her almost manic passion at times, so I am not really surprised. I like her swearing. It makes her feel more alive to me. And ghosts certainly swear, especially the older, more jaundiced and embittered ones. They grumble ceaselessly like turkeys, replacing gobble-gobble with fuck-fuck. When I come across them, usually in older houses, I always expect them to be smoking too. Fucking this and fucking that, puff-puff. Never understand, puff-puff. Here we are totally stranded, puff-puff. It’s fucking horrible here, puff-puff – a fucking disgrace (scrunch the cigarette butt into the carpet). Wander off.
Alice is already transforming into one of these. I fear that she is destined for a two hundred or more year vigil on this earth. This frightens me. I must find a way of saving her, of driving her into the light, even if I lose her. It may be fun for me at the moment, but it is not wise to become a swearing ghost. They remain too attached to the earth. They cannot tear themselves away. They complain that they are not allowed to leave to enjoy their eternal rest, but the truth is that they really want to linger here. They have an unfinished life, one which they hardly ever enjoyed, but they need to resolve it in some way. That is what I conclude anyway from what I have experienced. Happy souls move on, unless they feel that they have a sacred or devotional duty to stay with and protect someone special. That happens, especially between mothers and children. They don’t usually swear; they simply love. The rest are angry, very angry, and still very here, chained to the life they used to lead.
I have to recognise and admit to myself that Alice is one of these in training. She has remained here because she is very, very angry herself, not because she wants to protect her mother, however much she loves her and is horrified by how her father treats her. She wants revenge, which she is at least now admitting to herself, so that is progress. If I can persuade her to get this father thing over and done with, and then to feel love for anyone, even for me, then she may naturally drift towards the light and away. At this moment I really want to love her, and to have her love me, and it feels like an unselfish act, something that in the end will save her. That is why I want to hug her and to feel her against me. It is not merely habit.
All of which makes it very confusing with Fiona. I felt a terrible pang when she wasn’t there at the Château this morning. I wanted to drag her into the shadows of a darkened room (and there are plenty there), and to hug and kiss her and to feel her against me too. I feel a physical craving for both of them, and it doesn’t feel like I am cheating either, although I fear that Alice might think so and, as I will be staying so close, she may well find out. She may wander up to the Château to see what I am doing, all loving and cheerful, only to discover me doing what her father is doing, engaging in a random act of betrayal.
The trauma of that discovery could imprison her here for aeons. What do I do? For the moment I must park it. I must concentrate on what I am here to do and hope that a solution miraculously appears, knowing that a disastrous, tragic showdown is much more likely. Two-timing is difficult, especially when I am mostly trying to do both of them a favour – to act as a disinterested semen donor on the one side, and as a liberator on the other.
It’s hard to be good.
“He’ll be out soon,” Alice says.
I don’t think she is troubling her soul over me at all. She is all wrapped up in her own vendetta, intense and cosy.
I can sense Alice holding her breath (although she isn’t), hyped up with excitement and anticipation. She is a hair-trigger starting gun. When her father appears, I have to cross the road like a greyhound. As she says, it should be anytime now.
Is the door moving? No. Now? Still not. Come on, come on.
“Are you sure he is in there?” I check.
“Positive. I was watching him earlier.”
“Doing what?”
“Talking to Mme. de Belletier.”
“How do they talk?”
“Like Maman and Papa talk – not really listening to each other, each subject as boring as the last, or the next. They are not remotely animated. It will soon be time for Papa to move on. Perhaps that is what they are discussing now. That will be an irony. What’s that?”
The door seems to be hovering – slightly opening and then closing again.
“Get ready. Cross the road now.”
“How will I know it is him?”
“It is him.”
I get up and reach the road just as two solid queues of cars form in front of me, travelling slowly but with great purpose. There has barely been a single car for the last half-an-hour, and here are about twenty of them preventing me from crossing the road.
I can see the door opening. There is a slight gap if I sprint, so I do. I am almost winged twice as I sashay between them and, when I reach the pavement, I trip over the edge straight at Alice’s father’s feet, or at least I assume that is who it is.
“Steady!”
“Sorry about that,” I apologise from my knees.
“Are you all right?”
He helps lift me up. “That is quite a death wish you have there.”
(He seems rather nice for a fuckwit).
“I dropped some money out of my wallet and it blew across the road.” There is a slight wind and it is facing in this direction, so it is almost a plausible story.
M. Picard looks up and down the street. “Unfortunately I cannot see it now. I hope it was not a €200 note.”
“No, but I think it was a €50 note. I don’t think I would have risked killing myself for €5.”
M. Picard grins. “I think even at €50 you are suffering from low self-esteem. Are you staying up at the Château?”
“Yes.”
He takes me by the upper arm. “You are looking shocked still. My house is just over there. Come and have a petit cognac to recover, then you can go on your way leaving me with a clear conscience.”
I hesitate. “I don’t want to trouble you.”
“No trouble at all. I cannot leave you in this state.”
So Alice’s dad forcibly escorts me to his house. As we get through the front door he shouts, “Chérie, we have a visitor. He was nearly run over.”
Mme. Picard comes rushing out into the hallway. “Are you all right, Monsieur?” she asks with concern.
“I am fine now, thank you, Madame.”
She feels my forehead.
“You are a little shocked,” she declares. “You must come in and sit down to give you time to recover. I am Mme. Picard. This is M. Picard.”
“I am Paul Lambert.”
“Enchanté, Monsieur Lambert. Where did this all happen?”
“I was leaving Marguerite de Belletier’s house and there he was throwing himself on the ground in front of me. I was hoping he was a customer,” he jokes, “and not one who cannot pay us.”
“What were you doing at Marguerite’s?”
“I dropped in to say hello.”
“I thought that you were in Toulouse today.”
Alice has joined us and is standing right next to me watching everyone in fascination.
“I was meant to be, but Michel at France Géothermie called me just as I hit the motorway with the need for me to examine some pipes which had collapsed, so I had to postpone my meeting with the customer in Toulouse until tomorrow and reorganise the rest of tomorrow’s appointments accordingly. I had promised to see Guy in Sète, so I called in on him for an eleven o’clock cognac – you know how he likes his mid-morning cognac – then I came back here, called in at the tabac to buy some cigarettes and bumped into Marguerite de Belletier, and she suggested that I join her for an aperitif because she had been very busy this morning and not had time to have lunch. This was at nearly half-past-two. So I joined her and
we chatted for an hour.”
“What news did she have?”
Mme. Picard’s question is phrased to sound casual, but I am convinced that she is making her husband work hard to sustain his deception. I would say that she definitely doesn’t believe him.
“Oh, you know Marguerite. She talks a lot and she says nothing. It is mostly hot air.”
“You know Marguerite a lot better than I do, and I can imagine that there might be a lot of hot air,” Mme. Picard snaps back.
M. Picard smiles at me. “You must excuse us, Monsieur Lambert. My wife is a rather jealous woman. I think I’ll join you in that cognac.” He heads towards the drinks cabinet in the corner.
“Haven’t you had enough to drink today?” demands Mme. Picard. “A cognac in Sète, aperitifs with Marguerite de Belletier, and now another cognac, and it is barely four o’clock. You will be having problems with your liver if you are not careful.”
M. Picard places two glasses slightly clumsily on the table. He is suppressing his anger but it is mounting nonetheless.
“Will you join us, Chérie?”
“No, thank you.”
He turns to me. Alice says, “You must keep Maman in the room. Papa is about to blow.”
“So how long are you staying at the Château?” he asks me.
“Ask Maman if she has been to the Château recently.”
I address Mme. Picard. “I am staying at the Château,” I explain.
“I assumed that,” she comments non-committally.
“A few days,” I reply to M. Picard, “but we live at Valflaunès, north of St. Mathieu de Tréviers, so we will be here into September probably.”
“Where in England to do you live?”
“Actually, we live in Bruxelles.”
“Bruxelles? They have some very odd accents in Bruxelles.”
“They probably think you have a very odd accent too,” Mme. Picard bites back.
“Well you have the same accent, Chérie,” M/ Picard ripostes. “What is it with you today?”
“Perhaps I know why you spend so much time at Marguerite de Belletier’s house.”
“Please, not in front of our guest.”
“One time is as good as another.”
